One way to avoid integration problems, one might suppose, is not to integrate, which is apparently how Microsoft intends to treat Yahoo if and when it takes the company over, according to what Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie told the Financial Times.

“Technology companies, if they dive in and just smash things together for smashing them together’s sake,” he told the paper, “it’s reckless it’s just simply reckless.”

If Microsoft ignored all the financial and other benefits of consolidation, and left the “experience of Internet users and advertisers” alone, Ozzie said he was “very optimistic Microsoft could get what it wanted from the deal.

He apparently remarked during the interview that Yahoo has a “number of different types of technologies” and its own culture.